Technology

  • Dogfooding: Fighting the Post-Conference High

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    I wanted to take my own advice on fighting the post-conference high. I have 5 cool ideas I want to investigate over the next few months. Your job is to let me know whether or not they’re worth it and, if so, hold me accountable to reporting back later.

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  • Web Requests and Data Leakage

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    Even if your site is browsed over HTTPS, it can be insecure if any assets (images, scripts, styles) are transferred over an HTTP connection. This will trigger a “mixed content” warning in the browser that many will brush off as unimportant. The warning can be a major issue for some sites, though, and I want…

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  • WordPress Core Proposal: Aribitrary File Upload

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    I’m proposing a new feature for WordPress that would enable editors to drag-and-drop new media anywhere within the admin interface and have those uploads added to the media gallery. It would streamline several of my workflows. Would it help yours?

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  • Ethics in Software Development

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    Where do we, as software developers, draw the line with releasing new software? Do we build software with the common good in mind and ignore the potential consequences of releasing such tools to the world? Do we hold back potentially groundbreaking achievements because they could be misused by the wrong hands?

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  • WordPress Core Proposal: SUDO

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    Logging in to your WordPress site as an administrator when your plan is just to write is a bad idea. The admin user should be for administration and you should use an editor-level user for writing. But this dual-login workflow can be needlessly complicated on many sites. Instead, I propose we introduce a SUDO mode…

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  • Photon and HTTPS – Making It Work

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    Jetpack’s Photon service doesn’t like it when image assets are served over SSL. I took some time to dig in to the issue and coded a quick workaround to enable Photon on a site locked down to serve all assets over SSL.

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  • Server-side Analytics through Google

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    Some of the products I build for the web don’t come with a website. But I can still use Google Analytics to track their usage. Thanks to a handy PHP library I found on GitHub, I now have the luxury of tracking the execution of server-side scripts in the same analytics dashboard I use to…

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  • Securing XML-RPC for WordPress

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    If you use WordPress, you’ve probably used one of the mobile apps for it. If you’ve used one of these mobile apps, then you’ve used XML-RPC. If you’ve used XML-RPC, then you’ve sent your username and password – in plain text – across the Internet. This is hugely unsafe, and I want to work to…

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